Victorine stared at Dan. How a wonderful man like him had ever let himself get mixed up with Amelia…The fog of memory lifted a little and she remembered a woman, Jess, telling her that Dan had to marry somebody else. Some things hidden in the back of a cupboard in a box labeled “War.” A span of time when there was only noise and bandaged men who kissed her cheek and called her Vicki. A woman sobbing beside a tree at night. The weight pressed down like a headache, making her feel both sad and afraid.

She shook her head and the memories retreated and her fists clenched with the effort of keeping them back where they belonged, in the past. “That’s terrible. How must you have felt?” she said to Dan.

Dan shrugged. “James has been my son in every way that’s ever mattered. And when James told me he wanted to live with me after the separation, rather than staying with Amelia, I knew that we were as much father and son as any two people connected by blood. It’s too exhausting to loathe Amelia. She doesn’t deserve for me to expend so much emotion on her, not when there are others…” He stopped.

“So you have two children who aren’t really yours,” Victorine said softly, imagining she and James were the “others” to whom he had referred, and on whom he would prefer to invest his emotions.

“But who I love as if you are,” Dan finished.

Both Victorine and James reached out at the same time to hold their father’s hands.

* * *

They all went for a drive the next day. The hotel manager had marked on a map for Victorine the less touristy places, the ones with more character, he’d said, and told her to visit the region’s several beautiful chateaux before they distracted themselves with the champagne caves. The first chateau was, indeed, lovely and then, opposite a sharp bend, just as the hotel manager had said, lay the entrance into the second.

The long driveway promised nothing, which was why Victorine was so surprised when she saw it. Untamed and unruly gardens that held the bones of something beautiful, tumbling down to a fairytale palace.

“Look!” Victorine cried, as if everyone’s attention wasn’t already drawn to the chateau. “I hope it’s open to the public. Let’s go and see.”

She turned to the others. All the lines on Dan’s face were discomposed and the color had fled from his skin. “Are you all right?” she asked at the same time as she felt the butterfly wings of memory flutter at the edge of her mind. The sensation quickly vanished in her concern for Dan.

“Did you come here during the war?” she asked, knowing that Dan loathed to visit war museums and the like. “You were posted near Reims at one point, weren’t you?” she said slowly, wondering if that was why he’d hesitated when she’d first suggested beginning their holiday in this part of France, cursing herself for not having thought more about it.